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Often-derided tape storage gets a vote of confidence as HP and Sony team on a new DAT format while IBM and Sun break the terabyte barrier.

This week is shaping up to be one of the busiest in storage tape history, with HP and Sony teaming up to create the next generation of Digital Audio Tape (DAT), while Sun and IBM fight for the crown of being first with a 1 terabyte (TB) tape drive.

To some, the news signals that tape storage remains alive and well in the era of ever-cheaper hard drives.

"Tape is the Rodney Dangerfield of storage," Robert Amatruda, research director at IDC, told InternetNews.com. "No doubt there has been a decline in the market, but it's still a relevant technology widely deployed. The news proves there's still strong investment in what's become a mature technology

Tape has long been an important piece of the storage infrastructure puzzle for many businesses, especially small and midsized companies that need economical and easy-to-manage backup and disaster recovery.

While it doesn't dominate the storage market like it did during the mid- to late 1990s, tape has evolved into a reliable, strong performing fit for lower-end markets, according to Bob Wilson, vice president of storage platforms for HP StorageWorks.

"Its death is overly exaggerated as it's a very vibrant technology," Wilson told InternetNews.com.

That vibrancy is what prompted HP (NYSE: HPQ) and Sony (NYSE: SNE) to co-develop DAT 320, the seventh generation of the Digital Data Storage (DDS) standard, announced today. The two vendors will build and sell their own tape drives on the new standard.

Demand for higher-capacity data backup and archiving continues to be important for small and midsized businesses and enterprise environments," Masayoshi Sugiyama, president for Sony's chemical device business group, said in a statement. "Combining HP's six DAT generations and Sony's 50-year history in magnetic recording technology provides a compelling solution."

The DAT 320 will offer up to 320 gigabytes (GB) of capacity on a single cartridge, double what the current DAT 160 provides. The vendors said the new format will need less energy per GB while also remaining backward compatible.

Terabyte tape arrives -- twice

Elsewhere in the tape world, Sun and IBM are dueling for the title of the first to market with a 1 TB drive, with each announcing products this week.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today launched the System Storage TS1130 Tape Drive, targeted toward midsized businesses in financial services and life sciences as well as the public sector.

The product's 160MB/sec. speed is 54 percent faster than the previous-generation drive. But it's the new tape head that's the compelling technology story, according to Bruce Master, worldwide tape storage marketing manager at IBM.

The Giant Magnetoresistive (GMR) head design, which has been in development for years, cuts down data read errors, improves data integrity and reliability, he said.

"You can put more tracks on the tape with this head, and that means write more data," Master said, describing the design as similar to a wide, one-lane road that's divided into eight lanes to support greater traffic flow.

Additionally, the new head's design could mark a change that remains in place for years to come.

"This first-generation GMR should be a good technology for the next eight to 10 years," Master said, adding that other tape elements have in recent years undergone similar evolutions, including the chipset and read/write elements. Together, such improvements have contributed to tape's continued progress.

"Just 10 years ago, we were excited about 10 GB on a tape, now it's a hundred fold that capacity," he said.

At the same time, such product evolution is needed to keep tape a viable option in a world where the price of disk-based storage options continues dropping, industry-watchers said.

"Those who say tape is dead or dying are the uneducated," Brian Babineau, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, told InternetNews.com. "Disk and tape will coexist and new standards are important for bigger, better and faster technology."

Meanwhile, Sun (NASDAQ: JAVA) has plans of its own regarding terabyte-capacity tapes, yesterday releasing the StorageTek T10000B tape drive for larger-scale and mainframe environments.

"Sun has again delivered on its promise to help customers achieve greater datacenter efficiency and raised the bar on the industry by bringing the world's first 1 TB tape storage drive to market," Jason Schaffer, Sun's senior director for storage marketing, said in a statement.

Since it's backward compatible, the T10000B can read and write 500GB media from Sun's existing StorageTek T10000 tape drives. With the new drive, those same tape cartridges can also now support up to 1 TB of capacity.

IDC's Amatruda said the investments in new product design from HP, Sony, IBM and Sun prove that tape is still an innovative technology, some 50 years after its debut.

"It shows the longevity of the technology," he said. "These products and capacity points acknowledge there is a viable market to be addressed."

Greg Schulz, founder and senior analyst of StorageIO, echoed his fellow pundits' views, calling tape a "zombie" technology.

"It's been declared dead for decades, yet it lives on," Schulz said. "It's still here because of its economics, reliability and capacity."

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While this is a complex challenge that requires both policy and technology, cryptography is emerging as the foundation for data protection and is quickly becoming the cornerstone of security best practice. It is the last line of defence. Even if perimeter security is breached, cryptography means the data remains worthless unless it can be unlocked. Once seen as a specialised, esoteric discipline of information security, cryptography is finally coming of age.

Cryptography and encryption are not new technologies. Ever since the Egyptians, encryption has been seen as the most reliable way to secure data. National security agencies and major financial institutions have long protected their sensitive data using encryption, but today it is being deployed across in a much wider set of industry sectors, applications and platforms.

As merchants and retailers take action in order to meet the stringent Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), the need to protect sensitive data is highlighted by the recent TJX breach that exposed at least 45 million customers’ credit and debit card records.

The investigation by the Canadian Government indicated that the lack of proper encryption was to blame; but looking more broadly the issue isn’t limited to just credit card data. In September last year, more than 800,000 people who applied for jobs at clothing retailer the Gap Inc. were alerted to the fact that a laptop containing personal information was stolen, exposing the applicants to potential identity theft.

A recent independent survey conducted by industry analyst firm Aberdeen Group supports this increased use of encryption, while also highlighting the need for better encryption key management.

The survey found that best-in-class organisations (a category that Aberdeen defined as including organisations that have seen the most improvement in their IT security effectiveness over the past 12 months) reflected a major increase in the deployment of cryptography to protect sensitive data.

81% of respondents had increased the number of applications using encryption, 50% had increased the number of locations implementing encryption and 71% had increased the number of encryption keys under management compared with one year ago.

In order to address the challenges brought about by the increased deployment of cryptography, the same best-in-class companies were 60% more likely than the industry average to take a more strategic approach to encryption and key management. This is compared to the traditional and more tactical approach of addressing isolated points of risk such as the theft of laptops or backup tapes.

The survey concludes that by investing in enterprise encryption and key management technologies, these organisations have already benefited by lowering the instances of actual or potential exposure, while simultaneously reducing key management costs by an average of 34%.

Access to encryption technology is getting easier and easier. It often comes bundled for free and has already made its way into a host of devices we use every day. Laptop computers, wireless access points and even devices such as vending machines, parking meters, gaming machines and electronic voting terminals, have encryption embedded. The same is true for business applications and data centre hardware such as back-up tape devices and database software.

The widespread availability of encryption is good news but without a clear way of managing its deployment a number of pitfalls remain. We all need to look seriously at the management of the cryptographic keys - the secret codes that lock and unlock the data.

Encryption is a powerful tool, but getting it wrong either from a technology or operational perspective can at best result in a false sense of security and, at worst, leave your data scrambled forever. If a key is lost, access to all of the data is lost. To put it bluntly, encryption without competent key management is effectively electronic data shredding. Just as with house keys, office keys or car keys, care must be taken to keep backups and thought needs to be given to who has access to the keys. Establishing a key management policy and creating an infrastructure to enforce it is therefore a vital component of a successful security deployment.

Key management is about bringing encryption processes under control, both from a security and a cost perspective. Keys must be created, backed up, delivered to the systems that need them, on time and ideally automatically under the control of the appropriate people, and finally deleted at the end of their life-span. In addition to the logistics of handling keys securely it is also critical to set and enforce policies that define the use of keys - the who, when, where and why of data access.

Archiving, recovery and delivery of keys are all crucial parts of the equation. For instance, if a laptop breaks down or a backup tape is stolen the issue is not just one of security, but also business continuity. Information recovery takes on a whole new dimension, particularly in an emergency situation when the recovery process is performed in a different location, by a different team, governed by different policies and on protected data that is years or even decades old. What used to be a data management problem is now also a serious key management problem.

Traditionally, key management has been tied to specific applications and therefore quickly becomes fragmented as the number of applications increases. Scalability quickly becomes an issue as a result of relying on manual processes for renewing certificates, rolling-over keys or moving and replicating keys across multiple host machines and removing keys as machines and storage media are retired, fail or redeployed. This also results in higher costs, particularly where security and audit ability are high priorities.

The only way to deal with these challenges is through the use of a dedicated, general purpose key management system that can act as a centralised repository for storing and distributing keys for multiple applications or ‘end-points’. This provides a simple mechanism to unify key management policies and automate key life-cycle management tasks, greatly reducing costs and easing time critical tasks such as key recovery, key revocation and auditing.

But the key management solution itself must also be able to deliver complete security and integrity if it is to underpin enterprise date protection. This includes the security of the key repository, tamper controls surrounding audit capabilities and the fundamental integrity of the key management software.

If, as it seems, encryption is increasingly seen as the last line of defence to protect data, the key management challenge needs to be addressed. But this should not be a barrier. Implementing a flexible and extensible solution that automates many of the time-consuming and error-prone key management tasks in an automated manner is now achievable. But you need to deploy the correct tool to manage the keys. In the same way that data protection has moved from an IT challenge to a C-level issue, key management has now become a high-level business imperative.

Written By Richard Moulds, a man who trusts nobody but his Momma